All right, once again I come crawling on my knees to SD Tech Support!
My wife got me a Roxio Easy CD Creator. The main reason for us getting it is to take analog audio off a cassette tape player and burn the sound files into CDs, or so it is advertised.
To do this we need, it sez here, “an audio cable with RCA to mini-jack connectors”.
Oooookay I go Radio Shack and get said item, BUT . . .of course, much to my horror, there seems to be no double female output on the back of my AIWA CD/cassette tape player.
Do I need female output jacks on my cassette tape device to make this work? My AIWA uses those cheezy tabs you pull away and then put in the wire from the speakers.
Or am I plugging everything in wrong? Should I be going into the microphone? Because whenever there is a sound in the room, the “Spin Doctor” “hears” it.
But I hooked up my wife’s CD player, which DOES have CD female outputs, and you can get the CD if you hook it up to the microphone, but not tape.
Or am I just totally missing something really stupid here??
You can do what I did, and (using a portable tape player, connect the headphone jack to the line-in on your sound card, encode the incomeing audio as WAV or MP3 files then burn it to a CD.
I had several old tapes from private label bands that weren’t available any longer and wanted to save them against their inevitable self-destruction.
You need a 1/8" stereo male plug (assuming your Aiwa headphone output is stereo) to 1/8" stereo male plug cable.
Per ryan if the Aiwa has no line level RCA output jacks you will need to use the Aiwa headphone jack as the output source. You want to make sure it goes to “line” in not “mic” in on the back of your sound card as headphone level output will likely overdrive and distort the sound if plugged into the “mic” input which is intended to handle and amplify the very low input levels of a typical microphone, not headphone level output which is at a much higher level.
If the “mic” input is your only input you can get an attenuator plug or cable to take the headphone level down to range the mic input can handle with without distorting.
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you think about taking your speaker level output from the Aiwa into the sound card or you will possibly blow the card and do other damage.
If you are picking up sound input whenever there is sound in the room it is likely you have a mike plugged in and active. You need to unplug this or disable the mike via the little Win98 sound control panel or these extraneous sounds will possibly interfere with a clean recording.
Don’t count on getting great sound quality - the quality of tape players in the all-in-one units is usually sub-par.
Remember that the volume control on your tape player will affect the level of the audio going into your sound card.
This means:
A) Don’t change it while you’re capturing, and
B) You will probably have to experiment a little before you determine the correct level to use. Too low and you may get some noise (depending on how clean the amplifier section in the Aiwa is), too high and you’ll overdrive the sound card.
